The research project “German Today” aims to determine the amount of regional variation in (near-) standard German spoken by young and older educated adults, and to identify and locate the regional features. To this end, an extensive corpus of read and spontaneous speech is currently being compiled. German is a so-called pluricentric language. With our corpus we aim to determine whether national or regional standards really exist. Furthermore, the linguistic variation due to different contextual styles (read vs. spontaneous speech) shall be analysed. Finally, the corpus will enable us to investigate whether linguistic change has occurred in the domain of the German standard language. The main focus of all research questions is on phonetic variation (lexical variation is only of minor interest). Read and spontaneous speech of four secondary school students (aged seventeen to twenty) and two fifty- to sixt-year-olds is recorded in 160 cities throughout the German-speaking area of Europe. All participants read a number of short texts and word lists, name pictures, translate from English, and take part in a sociobiographic interview and a map task experiment. The resulting corpus will comprise over 1000 hours of orthographically and (in part) phonetically transcribed speech.

Ph@ttSessionz and Deutsch heute are two large German speech databases. They were created for different purposes: Ph@ttSessionz to test Internet-based recordings and to adapt speech recognizers to the voices of adolescent speakers, Deutsch heute to document regional variation of German. The databases differ in their recording technique, the selection of recording locations and speakers, elicitation mode, and data processing.
In this paper, we outline how the recordings were performed, how the data was processed and annotated, and how the two databases were imported into a single relational database system. We present acoustical measurements on the digit items of both databases. Our results confirm that the elicitation technique affects the speech produced, that f0 is quite comparable despite different recording procedures, and that large speech technology databases with suitable metadata may well be used for the analysis of regional variation of speech.